Solutions

Managing Content Management

Are you managing the system, or are you letting it manage you? As Web sites continue to evolve into strategic business communication tools, there is a mounting need to manage the content that drives that communication. Content management systems (CMS) ensure that organizations keep their content clean and organized, reduce redundancy, enhance security, make audits simple, provide reporting and metrics, and smooth the flow of content creation, approval, and publishing. Therefore, a good content management tool will allow you to create and maintain an engaging presence for web users while eliminating bottlenecks with IT. By having all your content you worked so hard on in one place, organizations are able to easily distribute specific information to users as people and devices relying more and more on the web.

More than a Machine

While a CMS change how you manage content, a CMS also drastically changes the way business processes function. As a result, many organizations continue to face basic issues despite the sophistication of the system. These issues can range from underestimating the amount of effort it will take to implementing the CMS to having workers be resistant to the new system because they don’t understand the value that can be derived from the system:

Heavy reliance on IT for implementation and changes:
the work effort to implement a CMS is often larger than people think. Once in place, existing IT processes can make system modifications and enhancements complicated and slow.
Resistance to change:
while the sponsor of a CMS project may understand the value that such bring, key stakeholders and end users too often do not. Changing how roadblock – as well as a political minefield – on your CMS project.
Buying the over-promise:
the system promises to solve all your content management issues, understand what those issues are? Or whether the configuration you’re spending money on meets your needs in a cost-effective way?

Plan for the Ripples

Because CMS consolidates all the information in an organization in a new way, the CMS in nature crosses every functional area resulting in a change a ripple effect. The key is to recognize that you will be introducing more than a new piece of technology. You will be proposing changes to some of the fundamental; ways in which your organization operates. For this reason, the CMS you choose must be determined by the goals of your site and the content you want to manage.

Understand the business goals of a CMS

When implementing a CMS, you are looking for a more efficient way to manage the creation, production, and organization of content. By making sure you thoroughly understand the business drivers and the desired outcomes, you can ensure to get the most of the CMS. To establish your organizations needs from CMS, evaluate the importance of each need within the context of your business:

Authoring, editing, updating, and owning content
Meta-tagging (describing)
Collaboration between content contributors
Review and approval workflow(s)
Security
Versioning/version control
Content display control
Template creation
Content syndication and reuse
Audience/content personalization

Once you clearly understand which business needs will be met by the CMS and how much value can add to your business operations, the next step is to fully understand what areas of the business affect. If you already have CMS in place, doing a little more analysis can help you understand how the system could better serve your audiences or how to extend its functionality to new areas of the business. Taking the time to understand which departments will be affected and what their current processes consensus and save you a lot of headaches – whether you are rolling out a new solution, with one that’s already in place.

How?

Start by looking at your list of business goals and asking some questions in:

Who owns the content that will be managed? Often there will be a number of content owners for different elements.
What are the current processes to manage content? How is it produced, archived, and reported on?
How do these processes differ from one department to another?
How much of the process does it make sense to automate, and how much should stay offline?
What are the various relationships within and outside of the content publishing team.

Increase Adoption through Communication

Humans don’t like change. However, by implementing a CMS in your organization change will occur. Unfortunately one of the most overlooked elements of implementing a CMS is preparing your organization for the change by marketing it internally. Missing this crucial step results in employees not buying into the new technology, therefore, CMS isn’t utilized to its full potential. To avoid this you will need to identify key people who will interact with the CMS. These people include the IT managers and the process and systems that it will affect and of course the end user who will use the system once implemented.

Bottom Line

At the end of the day, the best CMS is the one that meets your business goals. Driving content management system evaluation, implementation, and configuration out of business needs will help ensure that your CMS is the right technology. But understanding how your organization will need to change, planning for that change, and achieving the buy-in to make it happen will help ensure that your CMS is the right business solution.

Page10 Support

Whether you are starting from the ground up, or working with an existing solution, page10 will align business needs and goals with the technology to help you get the most out of content management. At page10, we can create or deploy content management tools and packages that turn your CM burden into a strategy asset.

Evaluation: We help you define business and technology requirements that identify your unique needs.
Implementation: we offer a thoughtful, proven approach to designing and implementing solutions that meet business needs, integrate with the available technologies, and ensure the intended ROI of you r project
Assessment: We offer an affordable quick-hit assessment of your CM solution. The assessment is designed to help you understand how your current solution-or your current need for one- can help increase the efficiency and success of your organization.